working where you work
Two hats, and the board reads for the second one.
Running the project at your own workplace is the ordinary case, not a problem to be hidden — but it puts you in two relationships with the same people at once, and a board that cannot see how those roles are separated has to assume the worst version. Say what both hats are, keep the invitation out of the hands of anyone who can affect a career, and the questions answer themselves.
Olivia Tremblay, MSN, RN · filed 2026-08-23
Name both roles in the folder. Keep recruitment and permission-taking away from anyone with authority over the people invited, hold what is collected where the workplace cannot reach it, and report at a level that cannot re-identify a small team.
Why does the board look harder at a project on your own unit?
Because the rule tells it to. When a board judges whether the selection of participants is fair, it is directed to be especially alert to designs involving people who are open to pressure or inducement (45 CFR 46.111(a)(3)) — the two words the regulation uses are coercion and undue influence — and permission has to be sought in circumstances that leave real room to decline (45 CFR 46.116(a)(2)). Colleagues are not on the list of named groups, but the mechanism is identical: someone deciding whether to take part while wondering how a refusal will land is not deciding freely.
Herzing's own application shows what caution of this kind looks like when an institution applies it to itself. The research protocol form asks whether participants will be drawn from the university's own community — its learners, its faculty, its staff — and notes that a yes routes the file to full board review. The board applies the same logic outward, and it is worth reading that question as a signal rather than a formality: when the researcher stands inside the population, the reading gets closer.
None of this means the project should move somewhere else. Practicum and improvement work belongs in a real setting with real staff, and Herzing's Statement of Principles positively expects stakeholders to be drawn into the work. What the board wants is not distance. It is a design in which taking part, declining, and saying something unflattering are all safe.
Which roles have to come apart?
Four jobs run through most workplace projects, and the trouble comes from one person holding all of them. Give each job a name in the folder, and the design starts to read as protective rather than convenient.
| The job | The risk when you hold it | A workable separation |
|---|---|---|
| Inviting people | An invitation from a charge nurse, educator or manager reads as an instruction, however it is worded | A neutral channel — a posted notice, a general email, an administrator with no authority over the invited group — with the invitation identical for everyone |
| Taking permission | Declining is hardest face to face with someone senior, or someone who writes the roster | Permission taken by a colleague outside the reporting line, or given in a form that never requires a refusal to be spoken aloud |
| Holding what is collected | Anything on a work drive, a shared inbox or a departmental system can be reached by the employer | The storage the application names, reachable only by named project people — with identifiers separated early and the key held apart |
| Reporting it | “Two of the night staff said” identifies two people in a unit of nine | An agreed floor beneath which findings are not broken out, and no quotation that carries a role, a shift and an opinion together |
Where the unit is genuinely too small for full separation, say so plainly and name what you did instead: the invitation issued once and never repeated to an individual; no list of who agreed or declined seen by anyone in management; participation not discussed in supervision; the results presented at a level no one can be picked out of. A candid account of a constrained setting reads far better than an unexplained arrangement in which you are the only person in every row of that table.
What does the second hat look like in writing?
Three sentences, in the consent and in the invitation, in the participant's own vocabulary rather than the board's:
- Who you are here. That you work in this setting and are also carrying out this project, and which of those roles is speaking today.
- What taking part does not touch. That the choice has no bearing on employment, evaluation, assignments or standing, and that nobody in the reporting line is told who agreed and who did not.
- What happens to what is said. Who sees it, in what form, and how it will appear in anything written afterwards.
These belong in the consent because that is where a participant looks, and the board reads the consent against the application to check the two agree. The rest of the required elements are covered in what a Herzing consent form has to contain.
Is this improvement work or research?
The setting does not decide it; the design does. Herzing's Statement of Principles separates research, evidence-based practice and quality improvement by purpose, by how much of the literature the work rests on, and by whether the findings are meant to hold beyond the site — improvement work being local by intent and run in iterative cycles. Federal guidance sits alongside that: putting a practice in place and collecting information about how it went, for clinical or administrative purposes, is not research; a systematic investigation designed to produce knowledge that travels is.
Two things make a workplace project drift across that line without anyone deciding to. One is the ambition to publish it as a finding about how such units behave. The other is a comparison built for the sake of the comparison — two wards, two rotas, an allocation — which is a design feature that generalises whatever the aim statement says. Herzing routes doctoral improvement and innovation work to one application and other protocols to another, so the honest reading also determines which form the folder is built on. Make the call before the documents, never after; it is the subject of the process, step by step.
What does the employer have to say about it?
More than people expect, and earlier. Three separate permissions can be in play, and none substitutes for another:
- The site's own written permission — on the organisation's paper, signed by someone whose title can actually grant access, naming the activity and the material it permits rather than blessing the project in general.
- The employer's own board, where it runs one. Hospital systems frequently do. Herzing's applications ask for a copy of the application and approval letter from any external board, and for a chair's letter of approval from an affiliated institution where that applies, so a parallel review is anticipated rather than exceptional.
- Whatever governs the records themselves. Access to clinical information carries its own rules inside the organisation, and clearance to carry out a project does not by itself open the record system.
Request all of these before polishing anything else — they depend on other people's calendars, which is exactly what you do not control. The application checklist sets out where each lands in the folder.
What about your own interests in the outcome?
Declare them, briefly and without drama. An interest that could bend a judgement — a role in the service being evaluated, a stake in a product or protocol, a reporting line to whoever commissioned the improvement — is disclosed so that the board can weigh it, not so that it can be argued away. Boards do the same thing internally: Herzing's bylaws provide for alternate members to be elevated when a voting member steps back from a file over a conflict, which is the institution applying to itself the discipline it asks of you. Disclosure is inexpensive at the application stage and awkward at every stage after.
One post-approval note specific to working where you work: what you collect and what you later publish are governed by the acknowledgements you signed. Herzing's applications treat material collected from the university's own community as proprietary and rule that outward reporting may not identify, reference or implicate Herzing, and they require the final deliverable to be provided on completion. Your employer will have its own view on being named. Settle both before a manuscript exists, not after — as with everything else that happens after approval, described in continuing review, reporting and closing.
What to do next
Draw the four-job table for your own project and put a name in every cell. If your name is in all four, that is the design problem to solve before anything is filed. The free application review reads the setting as a board would and comes back with the separations that would hold, the permissions to request first, and the wording for the second hat; how it works sets out what the desk carries from there. The project and its findings stay with you, and the board's reading of the setting stays with the board.
Sources
- Herzing University IRB Application for Research Protocol Approval — participants drawn from the university's own community and the full-review note, external board copies, data security, proprietary and deliverable clauses.
- Herzing University IRB Application for Improvement or Innovation Project Approval — location and sponsor, signatures, external approvals, completion obligations.
- Herzing University IRB Statement of Principles — research, evidence-based practice and quality improvement compared; the values the board applies.
- Herzing University IRB Bylaws — conflicts of interest and the elevation of alternate members.
- Herzing University, MSN to DNP in Nursing Leadership and Administration — the practice project and its practicum setting.
- 45 CFR 46.111 (govinfo) — fair selection and alertness to people open to pressure.
- 45 CFR 46.116 (govinfo) — the circumstances in which permission must be sought.
- OHRP, Quality Improvement Activities FAQs (hhs.gov, read via the Internet Archive) — when improvement work is and is not research.
- CITI Program, Human Subjects Research course — the training records the folder carries for everyone named.
Forms, routes and internal requirements belong to Herzing and to your employer, and both change; verify each against Herzing's current IRB handbook or portal and your organisation's own research office. This practice is independent and not affiliated with Herzing University.
the other tabs in this file